


Lost in Translation

by Toxic_Waste



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon With A Small Detail Tweak, Communication Failure, First Meetings, Gen, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-15
Updated: 2019-11-24
Packaged: 2020-09-01 15:00:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20259985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Toxic_Waste/pseuds/Toxic_Waste
Summary: Adora, Bow, and Glimmer set out to Castle Dryl to retrieve it's occupant for the Alliance. Seems a simple enough plan. How hard can it be, really?Set in early Season One.





	1. Chapter 1

Robots were something else, Glimmer decided internally. Something else, and something terrible. At least the Horde soldiers were… _living_. They possessed some sense of self-preservation for the most part, and they could be spooked or startled, and even gotten to retreat if they realized they were beaten. Robots, though? Especially _these_ ones, they did no such thing, with each one fighting to the bitter end, as long as it was capable of physically moving its mechanics in even the slightest sort of way.

It was sapping her power faster than she could have prepared for, and she suspected that no small part in their success up to this point (if ‘success’ meant ‘not dying’, a tenuous but nonetheless acceptable definition) would have to be credited to the fact that although these robots fought like machines of war, they were fitted out with bodies more suited to … cleaning floors or various other mundane tasks. It was the only reasonable explanation why broomsticks and flying dishes had replaced swords and bullets.

She was mystified as to _why_ at all, but not complaining. At least not about that – there were an awful lot of things to complain about elsewhere, not in the least the labyrinthine layout of Castle Dril and her being forced to practically drag the limp and weakly blubbering Adora down the endless concrete maze. Which was less of a complaint and more of an all-consuming fright, because… well, this wasn’t supposed to _this_ complicated, but nothing seemed to be going right anymore.

“Shhh,” Bow urged, holding up his hand. “I hear something coming.” He reached for his quiver and drew one of his handful of remaining arrows.

“What, where?” Glimmer replied. “I can’t run _and_ carry her. Maybe we should try a different approach – I’ve got enough power left to get us outside, I think. If we got up onto the roof…?”

“We’ve been walking for a _long way_,” he said. “I don’t think you could get us _all_ outside again.”

“… probably not? But I could do _something_, if it comes to that. How badly do you think we _really_ need two arms?” She grit her teeth. “No, no, no, I know we can do this, we’ve just got to figure it out. I mean, for goodness’ sake, we’ve got She-Ra with us. Well, we were supposed to have.”

“Are you taaalking about meeee…?” Adora drawled, giggling.

“Real well that worked out,” Glimmer muttered. “Shhh, Adora. Bow is listening for… something?” After the disaster that had been the attempt to get ahold of Princess Perfuma, she really _needed_ to succeed here, else her mother was _never_ going to let her past the castle walls again. Sheesh.

“Alright, I think it’s gone,” Bow decided, after having peered up and down the adjoining hallway for about forty years, give or take. “Come, on, Gli-” he turned around and stopped dead, his mouth dropping open.

Before she could react, some sort of brightly-colored tentacle shot from behind and whapped her in the face, covering her mouth as if in attempt to prevent her from screaming (like she was going to down _that _easily).

She lost her grip on Adora – she’d neglect to recount that detail later – and teleported upwards, manifesting a few feet above the attacker, attempting to re-orient herself in mid-air. (There really wasn’t enough airspace in the hallway for all of that.) But the tentacles were up here too – twisting formlessly around her and catching her up before she hit the ground, one strand curling around pressing against her face. (Wait, what the… were these made of _hair_?)

“Hey!” she exclaimed, slightly muffled. “What gives?” Twisting around to look at Bow, she found him pressed against the wall, but not… particularly being _held_ there, only being shushed by a single thin arm of the writhing purple mass that seemed to be everywhere at once.

“Glimmer…?” he said out the corner of his mouth, motioning with his hands.

She followed his outstretched finger, back to the source of the purple, a… an almost formless figure clad over in thick, dark rubber and some other unknown material, topped with an emotionless metal face plate from which two red eyes glowed eerily. Had the Horde somehow beat them here?

… and then one of the tentacles lifted the plate, revealing a surprisingly perfectly normal human face beneath it.

“Shhhh!” the woman motioned, holding a finger up to her lips. And so it _was_ hair, Glimmer realized, visually tracing it all the way back to the roots on the woman’s head.

“Who _are_ you?” she demanded, swatting away the one in front of her face. It curled around her fingers like a thing alive, sending chills up her spine. “Bow?”

“Don’t quote me on this,” he responded slowly. “But unless I’m sorely mistaken – and those book’s illustrations were sorely incorrect – it’s Princess Entrapta.”

Glimmer blinked. “Ooooooooh.” Of course – now it all made sense. She’d heard Entrapta’s description before, from her mother, but had never seen any pictures of the woman. With Entrapta before her _now_, all the scattered pieces of description clicked together into the whole – though the hair thing she had _not_ expected, and she was minorly surprised to see the woman was _not_ the rumored ‘eleven feet tall’ or whatever she’d been told.

(Heck, she looked to be barely over _five_ feet – where had ‘eleven’ come from, anyway?)

But wait! “This is good, isn’t it?” she asked rhetorically. “We’ve got her – now all we have to do is get back to Brightmoon. No more robots for us, and mom… well, she’ll see after all.”

“I suppose, yes,” Bow replied hesitantly.

“Well, how about it, then?” she asked again, swinging about in the air until she was facing the other princess. “Wanna join the alliance and come back with us to Brightmoon? You can’t want to stay _here_, at least, not with all these killer robots running around.”

Silence.

Glimmer blinked uncertainly, as Entrapta continued staring at her – smiling broadly, to be sure – but still staring without a wit of comprehension in her eyes.

“H – hello?”

And then Entrapta _did_ reply. “¿Ryck? Loyli lo Deenleepi oryli. ¿Loyli lo … Peep keebliy whene ieq?”

Glimmer’s shoulders dropped and her brow fell as sigh escaped her. “Oh, come _on_. Not _again_.”

* * *

New visitors! Or something of that sort. New people at the very least. Still exciting! And they – they talked to each other, too. It was all so fascinating, the way they did. Although she tried to keep an ear out for anything approaching behind her, Entrapta still couldn’t help but scrunch her face and try to make out their speech.

“Fgdippen, pinet?” that was the girl, the one who she’d seen teleport. (_That_ had been pretty cool! Entrapta wondered exactly how that worked. Maybe some sort of entanglement or maybe she’d found some bit of First- “Getich gerg uyt ábe rean chal Brightmoon dsivbii? Naíp sarleenik deskmoin bareep kallaç greg schardenen.”

_Brightmoon_ . There was a word Entrapta recognized, if only vaguely. The foreign name bounced around inside her head, so exotic with that hard sound right smack in the middle of the word. How wonderfully odd! It was a city – no, a castle  – somewhere out there. Or both. Maybe it was both! It could be both.

To be  _fair_ , though, the rest of… whatever she said was entirely out of Entrapta’s grasp. Though somewhere in there  _was_ a word(?) that had sounded a bit like the Drilyi word for “robot” – though Entrapta herself would never have used  _balleeyp_ in this context – so maybe she was just mistaken.

“B – branip?” the girl repeated, squirming about in Entrapta’s grip.

“Hi?” Entrapta replied, grinning and waving. “I can’t understand you. I’m … real sorry about that?”

The girl’s face darkened a bit, as if she’d just eaten her last cupcake and realized there were no more left. (Truly, an unfortunate circumstance. Wait! Entrapta would offer her  tiny  cupcakes. That might help, no?) “Vox, knglomber. Draptcha  _pop_ .”

“Hmm, no,” she concluded. “Definitely can’t understand you. Real sorry about that!” She grinned, and then was suddenly reminded of the _other_ girl lying motionless on the floor. “Oh, _yeah_. What’s with her, again?” She poked the girl with her foot gently, prompting a half-roll and slurry of unintelligible gibberish. “She’s so… floppy.”

“Dart!” exclaimed the _other_ girl – the pink one. She teleported again, straight out of Entrapta’s grip and onto the floor next to the floppy one. “Sad shera nextrone! Ajslippt, ripto. Qo wrdena tuska _rocjipp_.”

Pretty cool that she could just  _teleport_ like that. Did it have some kind of limit on how often she could do it? How far she could go? What she could bring with her? Obviously she could bring her  _clothes_ , at the very least. Maybe a weight limit or… Entrapta paused in the train of thought – to be resumed later, of course – when she noticed the other two just kind of… staring awkwardly at her. Awkward.

“Glimmer,” the boy said. “Qo scharlip teflocks wapier tinie ton.”

“Qo _pfhrab_!” the girl shot back, looking a bit … less than happy.

“Sorry, guys,” Entrapta said, shrugging. “Still can’t getcha real well. Or at all, in fact.” She grinned, coiling her hair behind her back and letting them both move freely again. “Maybe some other time we’d be able to go down to my lab and take care of that! But at that moment, there’s a bit of a difficulty there.” She tapped her chin thoughtfully. “Not sure what happened, exactly. That chip-thing, I think it’s a bit on the wack side, to be honest. But it’s _so_ powerful, too. Ooh, it’s amazing.”

That pink girl looked thoroughly fed up by now, and rolled her eyes.

“Snardyk,” she said, waving her arms about. Then she pointed at her chest. “_Glim-mer_.”

Entrapta frowned. “Is that your  _name_ ?” It was a foreign name, to be sure. It had a weird sound in there that her tongue kind of stumbled over trying to replicate. “Glimmer.”

The girl made a gesture – at least  _those_ seemed fairly universal? Curious how – “Tin.  _Glim_ mer.”

“Aah,” Entrapta replied. “Glimmer.”

Glimmer – if that was her name – rolled her eyes again. “Trecken pojj.” Then she pointed at her friend. “Bow.”

_That_ was a much easier pronunciation to wrap her tongue around, yes. “Boe.” It  _was_ , admittedly, curious that one would name their child after a ball of yarn, but, hey, at least it must be easy to write poetry with a name like that. It did rhyme with a lot of things.  _Alloe_ , and  _lleeoy_ , and  _boreao_ and…

“Pojj,” Boe replied, smiling. He seemed a pleasant fellow. “Órp klatrap ick mo … tex Ontriptcha?”

Entrapta was hardly able to contain her amusement at the butchering of her name. “Close, close. But it’s closer to  _En-trap-ta_ . See, like that.”

A look of surprise had dawned over his face, but he nodded. “Entrapta.”

“That’ll do, yeah!” she grinned. “I mean, it’s not perfect – you’ve got quite the accent, there, but it works!” He set off into a long string of gibberish that she didn’t bother trying to interpret. “Boe, and Glimmer.” The girl huffed a bit behind her for some reason. “Though as I was trying to say, we’re having a bit of a problem here in the lab. By which I mean _I_’m having a bit of problem, by which I mean I don’t how many people other than are still around here. There’s certainly not _many_ but there might still be a few.” She could ask her – oh, wait, no, she couldn’t. Hmm. Well, this was a bit of a pickle in the end, wasn’t it? Any minute now, even, something could come up on them – especially since they’d been chit-chatting, and working to get anywhere specific together was going to be a bit of a pain with this sort of barrier between them.

It was a puzzle  for sure – which was great, because she loved puzzles!

Glimmer had picked up the unconscious girl again, propped up over her shoulder. Yeah, and what was the deal with  _her_ , too? Did she have a name? What had happened to her anyway? 

Hmm, maybe this  _would_ be better solved if they tried to make it to the lab center anyway. It’d be a tad on the iffy side, but Entrapta was pretty sure she could pull it off – and her new  companions , presumably? Well, they wouldn’t have made it this far if they couldn’t take care of themselves, right?

“C’mon, guys,” she motioned. “I’ve got an _idea_.”

They both stared. Hmm, right. Well, there was more than one way to solder a joist. (No, no there actually wasn’t, but it was a just figure of speech, if a very strange one. Entrapta had never much cared to understand why figures of speech were so weird anyway.) 

“Hang on tight to your floppy friend,” she said, pointing at the aforementioned floppy one, who indeed resembled more a limp rubber hose than a biological being with a rigid skeleton. (Hmm, who said that she _was_ a biological being? That was a possibility. Maybe after taking care of this lab thing, they’d make a stop at the dissection lab or something. Maybe that was why they’d brought the floppy one along in the first place? It had to be _some_ good reason – Castle Dril didn’t get many visitors, as a rule. Or any, in fact!)

But that was irrelevant for now.

* * *

“Feebo teenen,” Entrapta babbled excitedly, hardly seeming cognizant of the that no one else in the room could understand her. “¡Loyli lo Yenoo bein byep baerii meap!”

Glimmer frowned, tensing up sort of automatically. Clearly the other woman was planning _something_, that much was clear, and she wasn’t sure if she was going to like whatever it turned out to be. Past experience had _definitely_ stuck in her mind how quickly things like could go south with no warning whatsoever. Perfuma and the… yeah, all that. (How was it her fault for not realizing that her childhood classes in Nachuron had not… stuck in her mind as much as she’d thought? She _could_ still ask for a bathroom or say “How is the weather” and… that was useful, right? In retrospect, maybe it was a _little_ her fault. Still, she hadn’t even remotely realized that they would speak so… _fast_. It was impossible to distinguish one word from the next, she wasn’t sure how anyone did it.)

“Did you _hear_ that?” Bow was still enthusing. “Okay, so, like, I had no idea it was pronounced like that. I mean, when they told me those stories about the history of Castle Dril, and pronounced it like I did – it was how I learned it, after all. And to think that all this time, I had _no idea_. I still can’t quite do it… how _does_ she make that-”

“When who told you what stories?” Glimmer cut in, though she was suddenly interrupted in turn by Entrapta speaking again, pointing directly down at Adora’s motionless form on the floor.

“Oh, uh, it’s not important,” Bow returned faintly in the background. “Forget about it.”

“¡Wariyp penalae adalane prane youiile ueyi yiy!”

“… what?” Glimmer returned. “Don’t you try anything funny now. Just because you’re a princess too doesn’t mean I won’t get- hey!” The purple hair-tentacles were back, after such a short time dormant, curling about and seeming to fill up the entire airspace of the hallway. Without seeming to even hesitate at the weight, Entrapta shushed her violently, scooping up the three of them and lifting them clear of the floor, following shortly thereafter herself, somehow ensaring a ceiling ventilation shaft grill too – and further somehow able to use it as an anchor to lift _herself_ clear of the floor by her hair.

Glimmer frowned violently, and was about three half-seconds from teleporting herself _and_ Adora out of the grip and off to… wherever they’d end up, but then Bow shushed her too, pointing desperately down at the floor, mouthing something at her.

Oh. _Oh_.

There was another of those robots down there, scraping slowly along inside the walls, advancing down the hall, illuminating everything in front of with an eerie red glow from what Glimmer could only presume was an eye… of sorts.

She looked over at Entrapta mouthed _sorry_. (That was mildly embarrassing, after all.)

Entrapta frowned for a second, but then shrugged and grinned at her, holding her gloved palms upwards.

The robot beneath blared something low and rumbly in it’s… robot way. “Bereeni dret tyip.”

It was the same thing that Glimmer had heard at least a dozen times before in getting to this point. All the robots seemed to say it. Probably some empty threat or hollow grandstanding, right?

Entrapta grimaced a bit and pulled her face plate down, actions which deeply unsettled Glimmer for some reason. But then the woman held up a finger, pointing out the ventilation shaft. It was a … large one, to be sure, and seemed to be constructed of a more sturdy material than air vents were often rumored to be.

Entrapta dug into her pockets and produced out of them some kind of… miniature screwdriver.

“What’s going on over there?” Bow hissed. “I can’t really _see_ with all this… hair in the way. What is she doing?”

“Quiet!” Glimmer hissed back. “Or it’ll _hear_ us.” Could it even hear? It _was_ a robot, after all. Maybe she was giving them too much credit. It wasn’t like she _hadn’t_ managed to take care of everything thus far, at least in a vaguely generous manner of speaking. They were still _alive_, and that was important too. She should probably bring that up at some point later, too.

There was a faint metal creaking, and she suddenly found her arms full of metal grate as Entrapta shoved it wholeheartedly against her chest.

“Reoemyn, Twilye saadei loyli li.”

“What the-” she grumbled, fighting with the unwieldy metal. “Why can’t you just hold it with your magic tentacle hair? I’ve only got two arms against your… hmm.”

Entrapta didn’t understand, of course, and she didn’t even seem to acknowledge it, either – instead proceeding to crawl entirely inside the now-open shaft, slowly drawing first Adora and then Bow behind her. Maybe it would be okay, though – everyone was being quiet, and it didn’t seem like anyone (anything?) had heard.

_Thud_.

Glimmer started, trying to reach out and catch up Adora, but fell far short and the unconscious girl’s head made solid impact with the edge of the vent. Her tongue lolled out and she brushed listlessly at her face, but didn’t seem hurt and made no sound. Glimmer exhaled. Crisis averted, then, now –

_CLANG_

The metal ventilation grate clattered to the concrete floor below, bouncing frustratingly high, once, twice, thrice. Ear-splitting echoes raced up and down through the hall as it came to final resting just beneath the … wheels of the robot down there, who studied it briefly before raising its eyes skyward. Its eyes _physically_ changed, too.

“_¡Bereeni dret Tyip! ¡Tyip!_”

“Okay, okay, time to go-!” she said aloud. “Let’s geeeet on with it!”

Entrapta’s hair wasn’t moving quickly enough to suit her anymore, and she was fairly sure the robot beneath her was growing taller as it reached for her heels. She didn’t have _much_ power left, but – in an instant, she was inside the vent, too, manifesting nearly on top of Bow’s lap. The rest of the hair flailed about like some kind of suffering snake as it retracted on itself. There was hardly room to turn around in there, but she managed well enough anyway.

“¡Wxeyy!” Entrapta called, her voice distorting strangely in the cramped confines. “¡Vineii loyli!”

Well, she didn’t need to hear it twice, and even though the words weren’t comprehensible, their intent was clear enough, and she set off as quickly as she could behind the group. Entrapta slid through the tube like it was second nature to her, and Glimmer couldn’t help but wince with how almost carelessly a random strand of her hair was dragging Adora’s limp self behind her. But there was no time to complain about that _now_, and something loud and sounding distinctly of tearing metal sounded from behind them… it was like she’d been shot up with adrenaline or something. Whatever was behind them, they did _not_ want to get caught.

The tube shifted from horizontal to sheer vertical cliff that seemed to rise without end. And then it suddenly, after what _had_ to be at least a hundred feet of solid climbing and increasingly wondering why this so-called “ventilation shaft” was so stuffy on the inside, it did nearly a complete one-eighty.

So abruptly that it caught Glimmer entirely off guard, the sudden disappearance of the ground beneath her hands causing her to tumble face first off the incline and tear down the polished metal chute at terrifying speed. Entrapta had been babbling at them again, that was what did it – it was so _distracting_, especially when there was no escape. It was no wonder she hadn’t noticed anything in the near pitch-dark. (A warning would certainly have been nicer.)

“¡Eeko!” Entrapta said, faintly, from the front. “Exet– ¡_Waaream_!”

The tumble ended abruptly and not at all comfortably as she slammed full speed into Bow, and the both of them crumpled against Adora, their combined weight squashing Entrapta face-first into the grate at the end of the tube.

“Ow…” Bow groaned. “My bow. And my ribcage. Glimmer, could you… get off, maybe?”

“Sorry,” she grunted. “There’s not exactly a lot of maneuvering space up here.” She sucked in a deep breath, trying shift about as best as she could to prevent whatever that hard thing was from digging into her funny bone like that. Yeesh.

The purple hair was alive again, writhing and twisting, and filling up the ventspace more than the hair of a single person had any right to do. It pushed up on her, as surely as a glacier, shoving her out of the way and slowly back up the vent, separating her from the pile of human body parts that been smashed together at the bottom of it. That was… better, yes. Maybe this is mission to get ahold of Entrapta was going to end up alright after all. She certainly didn’t _seem_ irritated – yet – though there was no guarantee she wasn’t boiling over internally right now, and was already plotting some way to get rid of them.

Some sort of metal scraping against metal filtered up to her ears, and not a second later, the ground dropped from under her again, and before she could react, she landed with a might wind-knocking _thump_ on a concrete floor in a heap with Bow and Adora.

Entrapta, for her part, seemed totally fine, having anchored herself to the lip of the ventilation shaft exit and remaining there, holding herself calmly in the air.

“Thaaat was fun!” Adora blubbered, stirring listlessly. “Let’s doo – ooo – ooo that again!” She broke down into a train of giggles and broken chattering that she didn’t seem to care was going utterly unanswered by anyone in the room.

“Deieseen fyie poliani Bi loylix wlylnia,” Entrapta began, gesturing broadly at an immense and imposing-looking metal door embedded in one wall of the hallway. There was a massive sort of lock or combination-looking thing glowing from the center of the door – and the moment Glimmer saw it, her eyebrows arched. There it was again!

The same sort of… red, veiny tendrils that had grown from Adora’s sword were back again, crawling from the cracks in the door, covering the lock (if that’s what it was) and giving the whole thing a distinctly unsettling appearance. She swore that, if she squinted at them, she could see them moving, advancing… growing – slowly down the door, as if in some sort of very slow-paced attempt to snag _them_ up, too. It was somehow distinctly more unsettling than some sort of root(?) had any right to be.

Hey, that _was_ the stuff from Adora’s sword, too. It had never seemed important before, but now that she thought of it, it _did_ seem awfully similar. Her hair stood on end a bit. Was Entrapta leading them into some sort of ambush?

“… leerile, Dowieb orilya niiyen.” Entrapta finished, her face falling for a moment as her brow knit in thought. “Aaaah….mm.”

“Right,” Glimmer replied. “I think we’ve already established that the whole, understanding, thing – it’s just not happening between us. It’s nothing personal, just business.”

“Sorry…?” Bow added, cringing.

“¡Telleiyin!” Entrapta abruptly exclaimed. She pointed at the both of Bow and Glimmer in turn. “Oryla oo… Ealeyin loyli li.” She clapped her … hair together, which was a thought Glimmer never had imagined she was going to need to have, and proceeded begin waving her hands in the air wildly, first up high, then slowly waving her fingers down, all the while staring.

It only took a second for Glimmer to understand, and she couldn’t help but sigh. “Are the charades really the best way to do this? I mean…”

“Oh, it’s the wind!” Bow exclaimed. “Wait, no – streamers. Confetti! Uh… leaves falling from trees? Something falling from the sky? Papers, maybe? Or feathers? Is it feathers from birds?”

“Bow, you’re not _helping_,” she pointed out. “She can’t even tell you if you’re right or wrong anyway.”

“Oh, that… that’s true,” he replied, scratching his head. “Well, hmm.”

Entrapta, seeming to notice the cessation of Bow’s frantic guesses, stopped herself, scrunching up her face in thought. She sighed, as if in reluctance, and held up a single thin strand of her hair. Staring for a second, she half-turned and then jammed the needle-like strand into one of the gaps in the door.

* * *

… on second thought, maybe there was a better way to get this idea acro –

_BZZZZZZZT_!

“Yowch!” the yelp was more than a bit involuntary as the raw current ripped through her body, practically physically ejecting her probing tendril from the door, leaving the ends of the hairs a bit blackened and even smoldering.

It was quite a distinct little smell they made.

She blinked, waiting for her vision to steady again and for the multiple figures in the hallway to condense back into just the two again. There, that was better. She frowned at the copper taste seeping from the back of her tongue – but that, too, would go away with time.

“So, you see,” she concluded. “Electricity. The stuff from the sky when it rains, the stuff from your fingers when you rub your shoe soles on fabric. The flow of electrons from one place to another through the path of least resistance. It’s here, and there’s a whole heck of a lot of it, too. It’s quite impressive, actually.”

Part of her was feeling a bit impressed that she’d managed to set something like this up in the first place. It was pretty darn cool, all in all, that much she had to admit. And so did these two, she presumed. The whole setup had in the first place been an experiment to iron out some of the more… elusive kinks in this old theory that she’d had regarding the conductivity of various bits and pieces of some of the First Ones’ tech she’d found: theory that had since been somewhat modified, but the door remained intact, running off some tiny shard of the tech buried somewhere deep in it’s innards.

In retrospect, it all seemed kind of obvious, actually. Only the ‘obvious’ conclusion still left her with a lot of questions, questions the answers to which she was positively dying to find out. What _was_ that chip she’d brought up? Why was it behaving so much differently from everything else? How was it affecting everything like this? There was so much untapped potential within it, she could almost taste it.

Almost taste it _alongside_ the lingering copper taste, which was definitely saying something to the strength of the metaphorical taste, there.

“Qo fpiken!” Boe exclaimed, beginning to pace rapidly. “Ah… ah… phel kjort… slalidiphen. Slalidiphen… ah, slalidiphenotop.”

“Electricity.” Entrapta echoed, imitating the convulsions again, though this time without actually subjecting herself to them for real. Maybe she should say the words more slowly? “We… need to get through. The door.” She pointed in it’s direction again. “But the electricity.”

“Slalidiphenotop,” he agreed, nodding gravely and looking over at his companion. “Morá renpebó dsche klampet ick ton?”

This seemed to kick off some sort of massively long exchange between Entrapta’s companions, who began gesticulating rapidly and spilling out insane amounts of their unintelligible tongue, all the while the pink one supported the floppy one, who herself (itself?) mostly just stood there and made weird faces at everything. She stuck her tongue out at Entrapta once.

She exhaled sharply, unable to break into the conversation and feeling a bit like an emergency gearshaft at the top of an elevator’s belt. She probably shouldn’t dwell on that, though. There  _was_ a lot to be done, with the First One’s tech she’d been studying, and perhaps more relevant with this whole “different language” snafu. It  _would_ be just so much more nice if these people could tell her exactly why they’d come here. (Did it have something to do with that ‘Breetmoyon’ place, then? Probably?)

But that was fairly easibly workable, she thought, producing a datapad from her backpocket and scattering away the work on it’s screen in favor of a blank slate. If she wanted to get around this barrier, it was only going to take a little bit of elbow grease, and maybe one super-powerful audio-processing algorithim. One that would be able to record speech, parse it, determine it’s meaning, decide dynamically the level of literalness versus idiomicity that was appropriate, and then play back the translation at an appropriate volume and cadence. 

… maybe it was going to be a bit more involved than she’d first assumed, then. But no matter! She already had an idea or two, and she was sure that these people wouldn’t mind a 16… no, 17% percent chance of blowing up if it was in the interest of science. Entrapta wasn’t, as a rule, very good at understanding other people (not in the least because there weren’t all that many of them left around in Castle Dril), but she was fairly sure that even the _most_ uptight of them would be scoff at a mere 17%. Still under a quarter! Honestly, nothing even to think about.

It certainly  _did_ take her companions well long enough to come up with a plan, but at last they did so anyway, mostly designed to take advantage of the pink one’s apparent innate ability to teleport wheresoever she pleased.

It kind of sucked, the way it all had to go down, when all was said and done. Her lab was a lot more messy than she appreciated, and she usually kept it  _pretty_ messy (after a manner of speaking –  she knew where everything was ) regardless. But no more of that! 

While her companions bickered (or maybe they were just politely conversing? She really couldn’t tell), Entrapta set herself about to righting this situation once and for all. Who  _knew_ what kind of cool stuff they could tell her? Maybe they’d even know where more of the First One’s tech was.

… oh, yeah, First One’s tech. Speaking of that… the floppy one. There was something… weird about her, Entrapta could feel it in her hair. As soon as the disc had been taken out of commission, she – almost magically – came back to life. The recovery was so sudden and unexpected that it kind of confirmed her theory about the girl being a robot or something. It only made sense, right?

She eyed the three of them out the side of her own vision as the three chattered, often casting furtive glances or wild gestures in her direction, for what reasons she could not decipher.

None of that mattered to her, really, though, and soon it wasn’t going to matter to the new three  _either_ , as Entrapta walked over a random one of the tables scattered about and shoved the assorted gadgetry and parts off with a wild clatter of metal against fiberglass.

“Alright, guys!” she announced proudly, flipping up her welding faceplate. The last joist had barely cooled from the solder, but it would be good enough. “You’ll want to come and see _this_.” And with a perhaps-even-louder chunking noise, she dropped the immense metal box from her hair and onto the table. (Did the table just… bow a little? Whatever.) “Come check this out!”

“Dsche krojd ton?” Boe asked, making a face, as he led the group over. The other two regarded it with some greater degree of suspicion, but Entrapta was sure their concerns weren’t justified. She knew what she was doing. (Mostly.) (Mostly? Mostly. And if she failed, well, she’d know better for the next time. It wasn’t that big a deal. She was at least 88% confident that they had a 75% chance of not exploding.)

“What is this?” she began out of habit, despite all her robots (who _could_ understand her) being… a bit in need of repair at the moment, and her only other companions being clueless to comprehend her. “Nothing _too_ impressive really. I only completely revolutionized most accepted operating knowledge on processing auditory and converting it from one form to another, along with the most advanced interpretative AI I could create in seventeen, uh, seventeen-point-three minutes.” She shrugged, grinning. “Nothing to it, really. Now let’s turn this girl on and see what she can do!”

This was going to be a bit of a  _fiddly_ process, yes, she knew. She’d need to get the frequency just right for whatever language her companions were speaking. It’d been easy to hardcode her own tongue into it, but this final bit would take a bit of a fine touch.

“Here, here, can you just … like… say a bunch of stuff?” she gestured at the three of them. “Talk, I mean.” She gesticulated as accurately and as obviously as she could figure out how to. “Do that.”

At last, they seemed to get it, awkwardly commencing into a halting string of dialogue. Entrapta grinned and pressed her ear against the innards of her machine, carefully beginning to turn the frequency dial. “Just gotta listen for the output,” she murmured softly.

“Morá renpebó _kin_ dsche klampet ick ton? Reticthi…” — (maybe here?) — “…todos que yo comprendo es, tu entiendo. _Neccesitamos_ ella y…” — (hmm, not quite) — “… terwijl dat is verkeerd niet – als wij gaan thuis zonder iets tonen, na alles dit tijd en werk? Wat is jouw moeder gaat zeggen? Of denken? Nee, wij kunnen…” — (still nope) — “…それは起こさせない。私が思うに、とにかく彼女を説得するべきだと思います。…” — (hmm, not that either) — “…chay' qa'majvaD pa' vu' maH Dalegh qej, jIH. : 'Iv ghaH 'e' vIjatlh…” — (definitely not, but getting closer) — “…Ma' podríamos meentik lelo' ka'a. Ka kun u láayli' asab ch'a'abil le ka'atéen, taak in wa'alik, ti' mentej alabolalile', bey u k'a'ana'an k juntúul, máasima'….” — (was this closer or farther? She wasn’t sure which, nor was she sure how one would quantify such a thing anyway) — “…You disagree alongside me here can not. I things of diplomacy _understand_.”

That was it! 

That was  _it_ !

Entrapta let out a excited noise of some kind. It worked! And from the looks of it, it was working  _perfectly_ , too. She grabbed ahold of the top of the machine, hoisting herself up to more easily see across it. “Can – can you guys all understand me  _now_ ? I mean, I only rewrote the entire book on the processing of auditory and linguistic data for this.”

“All I want saying… to wait, that is what?”

Her eyebrows arched, and she laughed excitedly as the conversation between the three of them died while they looked over in varying degrees of shock. She clapped.

“Excellent! Say ‘hi’, everyone! It’s _great_ to meet you!”

“… hello?” said the ex-floppy one. (What was her name again?) Or, rather, _she_ still spoke in her own incomprehensible language, and the machine picked it up and played back a more reasonable translation, but the distinction there wasn’t really all important anymore. “What … this is? And who _you_ are?” She stepped closer to the machine, eyeing it distrustfully as her fingers fidgeted with the hilt of her sword.

“Hmm, time to make a note there, probably,” Entrapta murmured, producing a tape recorder from somewhere in her hair. “Voice memo number twelve hundred thirty seven, sub-point B. A wrong word order. It’s probably a symptom of overly-literal translation, but considering I’m restricted to working from a single side of the spectrum, I’m not sure how I-”

“Hello?” the girl repeated, raising her voice a tad. “You… the name of yours is called? And this thing is what? I you can how understand?”

“Hello,” Entrapta replied. “I’m Entrapta, I feel like I already said that. This is my Automatic Universal Omni-Lingual Translation and Interpretation Matrix Transcoder. For short, I call it the AUOLTIMT. And it’s how you can understand me. Or how I can understand you, I’m not sure what you meant exactly there with that wacky word order. But it doesn’t matter, because it does both.” She paused. “Now, I have a question for you, too – _are_ you a robot? Or a construct of some kind? Hologram, hard-light projection, ethereal energy manifestion? What is going on here, exactly?” She latched onto a pipe-ending overhead and swung herself up close to the girl, shoving her tape recorder into the prime receptive range. “Tell me _everything_.”

* * *

Things happening all too quickly had become a bit of an unwelcome pattern in Adora’s life recently, and it seemed like this was going to just wind up being another notch in that rapidly-expanding list.

She  _tried_ , really she did, but  _every time_ … the situation somehow always managed to keep her playing catch-up regardless, didn’t it? It felt paradoxical, to somehow simultaneously be, like, the fulfillment of a millienia-old prophecy – by some accounts the pure incarnation of sheer power – and also to be constantly playing off the back foot. 

It was also  _exhausting_ , to the point where she barely even questioned the fact that her memory contained  an entirely unmitigated gap between her entry into Castle Dril and suddenly waking up in Glimmer’s arms in … here.  Where was here? What had happened? How much time had elapsed?

...w hat else was new?

Well, the purple-haired  woman , actually.  _She_ was new. And she spoke in a high-pitched and whistly sort of way, skating her way through syntax and sentences like no big deal. It was a language like no other Adora had heard before. There was an enormous metal contraption covered in dials and flickery lights and microphones perched precariously upon a table, and it was talking too, though in a much more… understandable dialect. It was Etherian, a root language that was generally not heard much in Brightmoon anymore, as far as she understood, but her Horde language classes had nonetheless left her with a decent profiency in the quote unquote “dirty common tongue” before she’d left.

The purple  woman swung forwards abruptly, nearly crashing into Adora’s chest, jamming a tape recorder into her face as she babbled and the machine behind them translated.  The whole thing was just utterly surreal, and for a moment she contemplated whether or not it might be best to transform, just to be on the … safe side.

“Hello! Myself I am named Trapten, myself feeling as if have spoken that at a time before this. This is the functioning with no need for input encompassing all known territory encompassing all known languages translation and understanding interlocking system _oeedipya_.” The machine let out a loud beep at that word, before resuming. “In abbreviation, myself I have named it _AOEYBINE_.” Another beep. “And this is being how yourself you are able to determine meaning of me. Also possible how myself I am understanding yourself. Myself I am unsure of your intent with that unusual words arrangement. But it does not matter, for since this can operate in two manners.” She paused for a second, as if letting the machine finish her words, before resuming. “At this time, myself I possess a question for yourself additionally. Are you being a machine? Or a building in some manner? Hologram, hard hologram, hologram? In specific, what is happening? Tell _everything_ to myself.”

The  woman herself –  Trapten (?  That didn’t match what Bow and Glimmer had told her earlier, but who was she argue with the woman to her face? Or her machine? It was certainly a lot  _easier_ to pronounce than whatever garbage Bow had been trying to say.) –  had stopped speaking long ago, but the machine kept playing back for some time – almost a full minute, in fact. (Then again, who was really counting?)

Adora sighed, doing her best to make sense of what she’d been told. 

Here they went again. She held up a finger. “Okay, first, let’s get one thing clear. I… I’m not a  _building_ .”

Of  _all _ the things she’d had to explain in her life.


	2. New Arrangements

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hooo, what's this? A brand new chapter? Why yes, it really is. This story is proving all too fun to write for me, so I did more.

Things were going well. Well, as well as one could reasonably expect of them, inasmuch as was generally … going on.

Things could certainly be _worse_, at the very least, and so Glimmer was trying to remain positive. Yes, things could definitely be worse. The Horde could be at Brightmoon’s doors somehow – if they figured out some way through the Whispering Woods – or … or, it could be something simple. There could be a fire or a spy or, heck, the weather could get nasty.

She clenched her fists tightly.

Things _could_ be worse.

“Were you in my room again?” she demanded forcefully, trying to speak over the incessant whirring of Trapten’s … gadget. (She wasn’t sure what it was.) “Just because you’re _here_ now does not mean that you can just make yourself at home!” Actually, her mom had kind of said just that – though it was doubtful if the foreigner had really gotten much meaning from the message, either. Either way, she'd gone and done it anyway, permission or no. “Well, at least not in my room…! Are you even listening!?”

That seemed elicit a response of some kind, at the very least. A response in the form of the whirring briefly stopping, in order for the woman to swing downwards from the ceiling – almost to the floor, but holding herself just high enough that she was still looking down into Glimmer’s face. (But, of course, right?)

She flipped up her facemask, grinning broadly. “¡Loyli lo P’whene!¿Yieuieq?”

Glimmer took a deep breath. “How about we turn on that machine of yours, hmm? Because I’m fairly sure we’re not gonna get anywhere without it.” Sometimes she _really_ thought it would have been a far smarter idea to just leave this crazy woman in her own castle. She certainly seemed more at home there (to say nothing about how she fit in, at least.)

Trapten blinked, and then whistled – long and shrill, straight through her front teeth. She grinned in understanding. Or at least that’s what the grin looked like. Inasmuch as Glimmer was an expert at reading faces, which was… admittedly not one of her strengths.

She was at least right this time, though, as Trapten swung herself down from the ceiling and just about landed on the floor, though the bottoms of her shoes never quite made that contact. Lashing out one of the ropes (?) of her hair, she latched onto the unwieldy translator and turned it on. The assorted dials and gauges flickered to life one by one amid a cacophony of whistling and metal scraping against metal.

“Allow us to … attempt repeatedly,” Trapten said after a moment, smiling broadly. (Or, well… eh, whatever.) “You may.”

Glimmer was unable to keep herself from sighing again. Why was she even doing this in the first place? Oh, yeah, her mom. And her mom’s obsession with ‘diplomacy’ and … really, look where that had gotten them so far. Clearly diplomacy didn’t fair well against the Horde, did it?

Whatever.

“There’s going to be a party,” Glimmer said. “Princess Prom, they call it.” She was speaking slowly, much more slowly than usual – doing her level best to choose her words as unambiguously as possible.

“Myself I can see,” Trapten returned, nodding slowly. “More information, what is being accurately grouped together for?”

Glimmer frowned. “Grouped… no, not _that_ kind of party.” She pinched the bridge of her nose. “A ball.” Trapten produced a round metal sphere of some kind from amid the tangled masses of her hair and frowned at it. Glimmer rolled her eyes. “A prom. Celebration? Get-together? For goodness’ sake! A meet-up. A… planned outing? There’ll be food, so I guess a banquet?”

At the mention of food, Trapten’s face had lit up, and now understanding flashed over her features like a flood. “Ah!” she exclaimed. “A party.” She shook her head. “On this myself I feel sorrow for not comprehension. My machine is not excellent – yourself it copied as “_party_”... various other purpose this word has. Many words – party, party, party, celebration, wedding, funeral, graduation, party, birthday. Additionally, feast. All to each themselves having their own meaning.” Trapten grinned. “But myself do enjoy consumption regarding to food. Small food!”

The last words leaked out in almost a squeal, the woman’s voice rising higher and higher until it inevitably cracked and she was reduced to a fit of coughing in an effort to recover it. Glimmer shook her head, unsure exactly how this woman was old enough to be her mother. It didn’t seem possible.

Maybe it was from all the solitude. She had been by herself in that castle, largely, and being isolated like that… did things to you. Sometimes really weird things. Evidently.

Maybe they were putting altogether too much faith into a woman who was clearly not… in touch with the way society as a whole operated (at least not anymore.) But what other choice did they have? The Princess Alliance of old had been Glimmer’s last real hope at doing – well, doing _anything_ against the Horde, and earning her mother’s approval while at it. If this didn’t work, she didn’t know what would – and she feared that _nothing_ would.

There was just one tiny problem. Etheria was no longer a planet united. When the last Princess Alliance of old had fallen apart after infighting and various other unfortunate happenings, the various kingdoms scattered across the planet had each withdrawn behind their walls like so many frightened turtles.

Diplomacy collapsed, trade lines were broken, and from what Glimmer had learned of history, in many places famine and even war had raged in the aftermath. It didn’t surprise her, then, the utter emptiness of Castle Dryl, or the positive regression into nature that the Plant Kingdom had wound up in by the modern day.

No one knew what had become of the Ocean or Ice Kingdoms – the former having sealed themselves off behind a magical barrier, and the latter behind a barrier considerably less mystical but no less powerful. Ice and snow and frigid weather of all sorts that clung to the grounds of the Kingdom like a compass needle clung to North.

All these things Glimmer _knew_. And had known, for a long time. But there was more – more that she hadn’t been taught, more that had changed and shifted and grown up between the kingdoms like a glacier – huge and inexorable, changing everything forever in it’s path.

Linguistic drift. That was what Bow had called with, and Bow had uttered the phrase with some degree of authority, as if he well knew what he was talking about. It wasn’t the languages per _se…_ those had always existed, in some form or another.

But it had been different back then. People were used to co-existing. Vast scores of people could converse in many of them and courses in most were available in just about every school across the countryside.

Not so anymore, after so many years of isolation, so Glimmer now understood well enough. At least with most of the Kingdoms, they were still… like, _there_. Communication had been weak to non-existent thanks to numerous barriers of geographical, linguistic, cultural, and climatic reasons, but nothing overly disastrous seemed to have, in large part, happened.

And then there was Castle Dryl. Once, purportedly, a thriving kingdom known far and wide for it’s exports of metal mined from the rocky crags surrounding it. Now… now a veritable ghost town that had, until recently, housed the only living remnant of the Dryli race.

The most recent reference book on Castle Dryl and the mother tongue of it’s occupants that she’d been able to find in the library of Castle Brightmoon had still been eighty years old, it’s pages yellow and curling and it’s binding worn to dust. What had happened?

No one knew. Deep in heart, Glimmer couldn’t help but feel the Horde was at fault for this somehow.

Glimmer had not been expecting the reunification of the kingdoms to come _easily…_ but she couldn’t have expected this… this great and terrible consequence of isolation that loomed like an immense crevasse between the kingdoms, between the Princesses of them.

There was still one hope, though, flickering oddly in the face of all this. And that was, Glimmer had determined, the Princess Prom.

She’d never been there before. But her mother had - and, as far as she could remember from Angella's stories, there had never been… _too_ much of an issue communicating. Then again… the Prom was not exactly a place conducive to long chats. Or short ones, or chats of any kind, really. It was cold and harsh and formal and she wasn’t really sure what the point of the whole song-and-dance was. But it was a thing, and a thing that apparently still happened.

Aside from them, though… well, someone would be there. And by ‘someone’, of course, none other could be intended but the Ice Queen herself.

She still lived – or so said the last communication that had ended up finding its way into Brightmoon, some thirty-six years old by the time it had done so. She still lived and was still reigning unwed, and childless.

She was also, according to Glimmer’s mother, a veritable paragon of knowledge. The Queens of Ice passed down an immense knowledge of nearly a dozen languages to their offspring, a tradition precisely as old as the Princess Prom, down to the very second.

It made sense, Glimmer reflected, inasmuch as anything did anymore. And if all went well, the Ice Queen, along with the Dryli princess' machine, would be enough to bridge this chasm and bring the Kingdoms together once more.

They hadn’t really thought of going to the Kingdom of Snows before now… the way was long and treacherous and wound for hundreds of miles through snowy desolation and frigid, untamed wilderness.

But it seemed there was no choice. If they didn’t, there was a good chance Trapten would blow up Castle Brightmoon herself, long in advance of the Horde.

As if on cue, something behind the other woman exploded suddenly, and she lurched forwards, nearly dumping herself into Glimmer’s arms.

“Unexpected!” she shrilled out.

Glimmer didn’t know how any of it was _still_ unexpected anymore. Shouldn’t she be used to it by now? She shook her head.

Good grief.

* * *

Entrapta collected herself, grinning broadly.

Something had blown up behind her, but she wasn’t too concerned: nothing back there had been particularly important anyway, and she’d be able to rebuild it in any case.

Plus, there was pretty good news to be had, too: she’d been invited to, of all places, a buffet!

Now, as a rule, Entrapta didn’t eat very much – her appetite had never really been the largest – she wasn’t sure why of that. (She _could_ go through several dozen cups of tiny soda, though, that was also simultaneously true.)

She’d never been to a buffet with other people… but that was the point of the whole thing, she’d decided. What better place to study the movements of these strange outsiders than by accompanying them on this odd sort of social outing?

It would certainly be a worthwhile experiment, if only to learn a little more about just who these people were who’d come to visit her so unexpectedly.

She’d learned a little bit about them already in the meantime.

There was Boe, the one with the bow and the high-pitched voice. He seemed nervous a lot; always nominally interested in her experiments but also getting frightened off by one or two minor explosions. The translator really struggled with the way his voice peaked sometimes, and it would make a terrible screech as it tried to keep up with the pitches he could produce.

He did seem pretty creative, though.

There was the girl, Glimmer. Entrapta had taken to calling her ‘the girl’ because her name was hard to pronounce. In retrospect she’d realized that she wasn’t sure how old she actually _was…_ she was already as tall as Entrapta was (if not for Entrapta’s hair), but her face was still, like, round and stuff.

Entrapta hadn’t spent much time around children, as a rule, but she wasn’t entirely ignorant, either. There were plenty of books in Castle Dryl that she’d read through at one time or another. She knew what children looked like, she was fairly sure.

The girl was probably, what, like one? Maybe two? Somewhere around there.

Lastly, of course, there was the _other_ one. Entrapta _still_ hadn’t fully put to rest her suspicions of the biological nature of the lattermost of the trio, but she’d stayed her hand in vein of putting it to the test anyway.

Actually, to be more accurate, she’d forgotten.

She’d never quite gotten the last girl’s name, though a host of physical descriptors swirled about in her head anyway. The floppy one. Even though she wasn’t very floppy anymore, it still stuck in Entrapta’s mind. First impressions and all that, right?

That was the way things worked.

Entrapta hummed excitedly to herself as she set about her experimentation again; upon Glimmer leaving the room.

All three of them had been so determined that she leave Castle Dryl behind for some reason.

She’d been a bit loath, at first, but they’d been so eager and had made all kinds of eager, broken claims through her translator that she determined it would be the only sensible course of action to put them to the test. If some of them were true, well, she had to be the one to find out.

Thus far… it had not been exactly like she was expecting.

Then again, she hadn’t really been expecting _anything_. She’d always known there was a wider world outside of Dryl, but there was so much already to be done _inside_ Dryl that it had simply never occurred to her to leave. At least not before now.

And now she had left, and she was here. There certainly was a lot to explore here, too. First of all, there was that enormous, positively glowing runestone she’d seen on the way in.

Entrapta knew about runestones, to some extent. No definitive theory about their origin had been formed (though she had her own pet theories about that), no real ideas about what they were made of (though she _also_ had her own pet theories about that), and no good hypotheses on how the mechanics of their conduit-ness worked. And, once again, she had … some theories. And some pet theories, too.

Of course, none of that had been particularly relevant in Dryl. There was no runestone in Dryl, and none around for hundreds or even thousands of miles. She knew this: she had spent some time looking for one, or traces of one, at one point, though an enduring lack of success made her decide that her efforts could probably be more fruitfully directed towards a different branch of the sciences.

There _was_ one here, though. And it was for this reason that Entrapta had decided that maybe it’d be alright if she hung out a little longer in this oddly-designed castle with it’s arches and glassy floors and guest rooms.

She was going to run … a few tests. A battery of tests, as the word went.

Her traveling companions had pointed out the runestone to her as well, but unfortunately the words they’d been using must have been even more thickly spread with local dialect and figurative speech than normal, because even her translator had _really_ struggled to make two and two of their sentences then.

It also seemed to reduce her description _of_ the runestone – and runestones in general – down to a single, brief word, which made her wonder if there was a single word for them in this other language, a word better than ‘_eyielli ija eiloweep-peewiyibp’_. Which was something else interesting to think about, really.

Still, whatever they were saying, Entrapta was positive it hardly mattered – at least not to her. Science, scientific pursuit – was calling her name and she was intent on being sure to answer. After all, if she didn’t, who else would? The secrets of the universe weren’t going to unlock themselves, in all likelihood.

Now, of course, she’d been invited to some sort of event. What it was _exactly_ she still had no idea, but she was rapidly becoming curious to find out. And, too, if there were these princesses going, there was a chance there might be more stones, too. This was all coming together.

She wondered idly how hard it might be to get ahold of one of these stones for the purpose of running some tests on it… she couldn’t imagine that it would be too difficult, though. After all, wouldn’t everyone _want_ to know as much as they could about the big, glowing, and mysterious crystals and their ostensible properties?

She couldn’t fathom anyone having an objection to that logic. There was none that existed, surely not. At least not any good ones.

The only reason she hadn’t done so just yet was that she’d left most of her big machines and computers back in Dryl when coming here. It’d been a regretful thing to have to do, for sure, but couldn’t be helped – and she was sure it was going to be worth it eventually.

For now, though, it meant she needed to build replacements for them, and on-the-fly if possible.

Brightmoon, as everyone seemed to call it, was a funny place. Entrapta wasn’t sure what to make of it, quite.

It was a large place, at least the part above ground, much taller and more ornate than the Castle Dryl, squatting back into the mountainside as it had been. It was chillingly airy and almost sickeningly bright, with floors so reflective that Entrapta surely could see her reflection in it. The whole castle seemed to be built of cloud instead of stone, as if it rested on the air itself instead of the ground beneath.

Entrapta was not one to waste time complaining much (not that there had been much to complain about in regards to her Castle anyway), but even she could feel this particular castle’s atmosphere. It bore down on her like a particularly vengeful summer stormcloud, leaving her with a distinctly uneasy taste in her mouth and a lingering sense in her gut that, for whatever reason she’d been brought and whatever she did before she left… she wasn’t _particularly_ welcome. Nor did she fit in _particularly_ well, either.

There were the people. It was probably the people. So many of them, really, so many that she had no idea what to do with them all. There were never people at Castle Dryl. Entrapta had _seen_ some, in the mouldering picture books in the castle’s library or in the digital storage disks stocked away in the vast informational archives. There were truly some extensive records kept there: well, sort of.

There _were_ extensive records, up until about a hundred years ago, at which point, the record simply… ceased to exist. All trace of Dryl’s more recent history was nowhere to be found – and Entrapta had, at one point, searched the castle high and low for them.

The tapes before then seemingly held no indication of anything out of the usual. The very last tape had some small mention of 'supply train disruption', but the bored - looking man on the screen had dismissed any worries and called it a minor temporary inconvenience.

Upon quizzing the robots populating the castle’s halls and byways, she’d been disappointed to find that although plenty of them were old enough to have been there, none of the ones that she’d not modified had any real sort of AI, nor were they able to recount their own past in any significant way.

It hadn’t bothered her too much, though: after all, she was a scientist, not a historian. So she’d not really thought about it much after that. Still, she did _know_ stuff.

She hadn’t expected everyone to be quite so _tall_, though. That was quite impressive. Especially stoic, helmeted guards standing at every doorway in the castle. They always glared down at her from between her helmet slits, and she always gave them a thumbs-up and they always let her through.

The robots at home, so many of them birthed, metaphorically speaking, from her own two hands, were the sort of people she could be confident around. She knew them all, their ins and outs, their habits and preferences and, for the ones who _weren’t_ autonomous, literally everything else too.

There were just so _darn many_ people around here, though. New faces, new friends, and yet… something drove her to put her facemask down as she prowled around the unsettlingly clean halls. (Curse their lack of internal thermostats and the accompanying ventilation ducts!)

She’d never been pleased with the way her face could… change. As a child she’d spent long hours studying herself in the mirror and wondering how her compatriots managed to keep everything so still on the outside, regardless of what happened.

Of course, it was because they were robots, one and all, and she was not, as much as she’d wished she could be at the time. She’d found a way around that, too, though – as all good scientists did when faced with a problem. A sheet of metal, strapped over her face, the glowing red viewports providing both night-vision and heat-signature detection and a handy-dandy way to maintain that same expression when she tripped and scraped her knee on the stone bricks, or dropped a box on her foot, or fell down a flight of stairs. Just like her childhood friends could do.

She was trying to find the pantry now, something that she could effortlessly do from anywhere at home, but this place… this place, with its reflective floors and glowering guards and it’s windows and… there was so much light reflecting off everything that it was starting to give her a headache. She pressed her pigtails against her temples and kept walking.

Whose great idea was it to build a castle like this anyway? She had half a mind to hole up in a closet somewhere and wait till night – but her stomach growled and her pressed on anyway.

* * *

“I did it, Bow,” Glimmer announced, collapsing on a couch and sighing exasperatedly. “I think she almost blew me to smithereens, too, but I got her anyway.”

“You’re exaggerating,” he replied from where he was hunched over a table. “She’s, uh, _Trapten…_ I mean, the whole Maker’s Guild is kind of founded around her. Regent of Dryl, I mean, what else can you ask?”

“Yeah, sure.” Glimmer cocked an eyebrow. “That was dumb, considering no one’s ever met her… I don’t think we’ve seen _anyone_ from Dryl … since ever?” She thought about it for a second, but decided it was too much effort for a point that she didn’t really care about holding anyway.

“That’s not the point!” Bow enthused, spinning around and looking all too intense. “I mean, politics aside, Dryl _is _the most technologically advanced kingdom of them all. It was them who founded the Maker’s Guild three-hundred-fifty-years ago, and even today we carry on that great legacy!”

“We?”

“Well, I.” Bow shrugged. “I do my best.”

“Well, a fat lot of good their ‘technology’ did them,” Glimmer decided. “What happened to them anyway?”

Bow frowned. “Well, the Horde… back when the First Alliance fell apart, I guess they drew the short end of the stick or something? I – I don’t actually know. Shouldn’t you know? Isn’t your mom, like, immortal?”

Glimmer nodded noncommittally. “No one seems to know any more about Dryl than we do about, say, Salineas. We used to trade with them and stuff, but that was a _long_ time ago, and who knows what they’ve been up to since them?”

“Definitely something,” Bow mused. “Trapten probably knows, we should ask her sometime.”

“Or maybe we shouldn’t.” Glimmer waggled her fingers dramatically. “Maybe it was her – she killed them all.”

Bow smirked. “Oh, you quit that. But seriously, she probably does know.”

“Equally seriously, I don’t think _any_ conversation you try and have with her is going to work very much. I don’t think that machine of hers is exactly… up to the task of keeping up when we talk.”

“That’s… that’s true,” Bow admitted, looking mildly distressed. “Well, I’m sure we’ll figure something out. Use simple words or something. We can do that, right?”

“Save it for Princess Prom,” Glimmer offered. “We’ll have plenty of time to… interact on the trip there. I, for one, am plenty happy to just point her at that ‘barrier’ they say Salineas has and let her off her leash.”

Bow frowned. “That’s rude.”

“Oh, come on, you know I’m joking.” Glimmer rolled her eyes good-naturedly. “And even you have to admit the woman is a handful.”

“Well…” Bow hesitated, but eventually cracked a small grin. “Can we settle for ‘exuberant’?”

“Fine by me,” Glimmer agreed. “_Exuberant_. There’s a word and a half.”

Bow looked just about to say something when the doors to the bedroom burst open in a flurry, banging back against the castle walls. Adora was there, panting and red-faced, like she’d just run a mile in the span of a minute.

“The-” she gasped. “The castle kitchen’s on fire.”

A low rumbling rippled through the floor, followed by a loud popping that ripped through the open window like a gunshot.

If she wasn’t so well-behaved, Glimmer would have cursed.

* * *

All things considered, the day had been going as well as one could have expected it to go.

There was an _awful_ lot of stuff on Adora’s plate right now, and she felt like was drowning underneath the weight of it all – dealing with her new friends, her new role in a new army on a new side in an old war, trying to be the figurehead for a birthing military alliance, and preparing to go to some sort of formal meeting that had been sprung on her out of nowhere, too.

Aside from all that, she was doing great.

Oh yeah, and then there was the fire.

If she wasn’t feeling so overwhelmed by it all, Adora just might have started laughing instead.

She didn’t. There was also a real risk that the castle was going to burn down, and that would definitely not be a good thing, either.

Glimmer would know what to do, probably.

And so it was she unceremoniously burst through the bedroom doors, minorly exhausted from having sprinted all the way across the castle grounds.

“The kitchen is on fire,” she gasped. “I just saw it.”

Bow and Glimmer stared her for a second, utterly uncomprehending.

“What?!” Glimmer yelped, being the first to respond, her shout apparently shattering Bow’s paralysis too. “That’s impossible! Here, lemme–”

She grabbed Bow’s wrist in one hand and rudely clapped her other down on Adora’s shoulder. Adora managed only to suck in the briefest of breaths before the world was ripped violently away from her in an implosion of magical pink shimmers. She rocked unsteadily, her stomach turned upside down as the place around her abruptly shifted in it’s entirety. From that of the luxurious Royal Bedroom Suite to the only slightly less luxurious Grand Kitchen, or whatever it was called.

Slightly less luxurious and lot more on fire, as it turned out. Immense waves of heat roiled out of the center of the room, nearly too much to endure.

“Wait, I have something for this!” Bow exclaimed, reaching into his quiver. “It’s filled with, like, detergents and… just watch this!” He strung it into his bow and aimed wildly off at the roof before letting the arrow fly.

For a split second, nothing happened, except the fire roaring and crackling from within the room. Then, there was a slight _tink_ as the metal arrowhead impacted the marble ceiling, and…

_kapoooof_.

A mountain of slimy, sudsy, foam exploded from the center of the room, coating every solid object in an instant, smothering the fire in a cloud of awful smoky stench that carried a distinct aroma of burnt hair and rotten eggs.

Adora gagged at the smell, blinking and wiping her face with her sleeve.

Something under a particularly large lump of the slime moved, suddenly.

“P’iuewuip-biene…” it warbled. “¡Ilyienei lo equiwailm!”

Adora had only met the source of the voice less than a fortnight ago, and it was already burned so far into her brain as to be recognized instantaneously. Perfectly nasal and somehow scratchy, as if coming from a throat that had seen one too many smoky days for it’s own good.

She exhaled deeply as two thick swaths of deep purple hair violently shook themselves in all directions, flinging droplets of foam and slime and a mysterious gray-green goop in all directions. It was Trapten – _of course_ it was Trapten, Adora really had expected no less. This was what… the third or fourth time by now?

First it had been the stables… no one had seen that in time, except Swift Wind. It was why he had been able to lay claim to her bed, and why she was back to sleeping on the floor. Then the bedroom Trapten had been given – twice. It was honestly enough to make Adora wonder how that castle in Dryl had still been standing after housing Trapten that long – it was like the woman was a living dynamo of destruction.

“It’s important we keep her around!” Bow had urged them both. “With her machine, we’ll be able to use the Princess Prom to reach out to everyone at the same time, and actually _speak_ to them. And possible rebuild some bridges, like, ah, with Plumeria. Hopefully they’ll have cooled down by the time Prom rolls around.”

He was right, although Glimmer still hadn’t seem very pleased. Adora had been personally more inclined to give their newest (purported) ally the benefit of the doubt, she was rapidly beginning to think there wasn’t much doubt left at all.

She’d peered into Trapten’s room once or twice in the span of time after they’d returned from week-and-change trek it’d taken them to get here from Dryl’s mountains. What once had been a perfectly beautiful room was… now a nightmare, and Adora’d spent her first eighteen birthdays in the _Fright Zone_.

The windows had been blocked off – one by a huge tarp of sorts that had a still as yet unknown origin, and the other by a massive machine of some kind that appeared to built entirely out of scrap metal and other miscellaneous discarded rubbish. Who knew what it did.

The bed was overturned, and converted into some sort of… desk? Workbench? The floors were stained with oil and gas; littered about with boxes and tools and literal garbage. A thick odor of antifreeze and sweat and concentrated body odor hung like a fog beyond those doors. Shed hair littered the insides like so many spiderwebs, and some of the ones more recently dropped still twitched about on their own in a distinctly unsettling manner.

Once, Trapten had been awake when Adora had peeked in. She’d not even heard the door open – just been crouched over her bed / desk and muttering furiously to herself in her language as she pounded away on something or the other.

The other time, she’d been asleep, even though it had been like four in the afternoon. Adora had thought the room was empty at first, but when she’d turned to leave, she’d spotted it’s occupant bundled up in her own hair and dangling listlessly from one of the ceiling rafters like some kind of oversized, technicolor bat. The whole thing was so patently absurd, that she might have stared in shock all day had Trapten’s snoring not roused her mind after a moment or two.

It was impossible to say what was going on that room, nor what the woman was building in there. It was some kind of… machine, but that was all Adora could tell. It never seemed to do much, though – and there was some kind of large hole in one part, as if waiting to receive an oversized battery of some sort.

Two Brightmoon guards had been assigned to the hall outside of Trapten’s room, just in case. That had been Glimmer’s idea, and Queen Angella had reluctantly agreed after the stable fire had brought those structures entirely to the ground.

What had Trapten been doing in the stables? No one knew, and Trapten herself only went on long incomprehensible rambles.

Swift Wind claimed something about her sneaking up on him in the night and trying to pluck feathers from his wings, but Adora was never quite sure whether to trust the horse or not.

“Please, can we not do this?” Glimmer was saying loudly, her voice dripping with exasperation. “We’re all having to count on _you_ – unfortunate as that is – to smooth things out for us at the Prom. This is our only option – but building supplies for repairs are hard enough to come by already without you destroying our castle from the inside out!”

Adora felt contractually obliged to step in at this point – after all, wasn’t that what heroes did? Step in and assuage the intensity of situations? Something like it, at least.

She didn’t even really get a chance to do that, however, as Trapten had already scooted across the room and was all up in Bow’s face, her tendrils of hair creeping around and pulling arrows out of his quiver, bringing to her face for examination as she babbled wildly into her tape recorder.

“¡Ceyuipi!” she exclaimed. “¡Ceyuipi!” Whatever that word(s?) was, it certainly seemed to make her very happy.

Bow was clearly in a tizzy, desperately fighting for his space and his arrows and trying to balance reality with whatever idealized version of the ‘regent of Dryl’ he’d had in his head heretofore.

He looked at Adora desperately, and she stepped forward and put a hand down on Trapten’s shoulder. (It was easy, she really was very short after all.)

“Look, uh – uhm,” Adora said, trying to come up with a balance between intimidating and calming – and, as she reluctantly realized, probably not hitting either of them. “Can we just relax for a second? You should probably… I don’t know, apologize?” She grimaced. “I know you can’t even understand me. What am I even saying?”

Thankfully, Trapten had stopped pestering Bow and had turned towards her anyway. She made some gesture with her hands and pointed at her ears – or, well, where her ears no doubt where, under the inches of metal that made up that mask thing she never seemed to take off.

“Loyli lo Deenleepi oryli. ¿Loyli lo … Peep… Deenleepin. Ahhhhhhh.” Trapten shrugged and smiled. Then she turned, and gestured towards the kitchen, what with the ugly scorch marks now scattered liberally on the walls and ceiling and furniture and everything else. She pointed into her mouth. “¡Qweeipi – lo qweeipi yiyl!”

Adora frowned for a second, then turned to face Glimmer, who was still very clearly not pleased with any of this. “I – I think she’s just hungry, you know.”

“Yeah, I mean…” Glimmer started. “That’s fine. She can have whatever she wants. She didn’t have to go and _light our castle on fire_.” She tapped her foot impatiently. “_Again_.”

“Well, yes…” Adora stammered. “But I can’t say that to her. I don’t know _how_, and that big machine is upstairs somewhere.” She turned abruptly as Trapten whisked by her, headed for the cabinets again. On instinct, Adora reached out and grabbed – getting hold of a big handful of the woman’s hair.

It was… a lot more _gross_ to the touch than she’d expected, and the sheer oily crustiness of it repulsed her to the degree that the strands slid out of her grip almost effortlessly.

Adora grimaced, watching the hair slam into the ground more firmly and lift the tiny woman it was attached up off the ground for her to rummage in the upper cupboards. It was no wonder her hair was so dirty, but… touching it directly had been another matter.

She wondered internally how the _heck_ they were intending to get Trapten into the Princess Prom anyway. She’d read the rules, and the dress code seemed to be very strict – along with the hundreds of other rules and codes and whatnot else was in those depressingly long scrolls.

Perhaps they could claim some sort of emergency override or something.

“This is really turning out to be not worth it,” Glimmer was saying, and Adora couldn’t entirely blame her for her frustration. “Now look – _who_ has to go to Mom and tell about this again? And who’s going to wind up getting off scot free?” She frowned. “I’m not even sure she realizes how much of a pain she’s been. I really should just ask Mom to lock her up somewhere.”

“I… maybe?” Adora tentatively replied. She looked desperately at Bow for support, but he only stared at Trapten, in rapt attention. Clearly, he wasn’t going to be any help: not in the least judging by his facial expression, either. “Look, look… can we – how about we just make it to Prom?”

She didn’t know what to do, exactly – she wanted to help her friends, but this Alliance _would_ be really instrumental in bringing down the Horde once and for all, too. “How about this,” she proposed. “If I …” (what was she getting herself into) “… I assign myself to babysit her until Prom arrives – what’s it, like three days now? It’s not that much longer. I’ll babysit, nothing bad more will happen. She’ll not get upset, and so she’ll help us, and then afterwards we can… well, I don’t know. We can cross that bridge when we get there.”

Glimmer frowned deeply. “Fine. But only till Prom. Because I _still_ have to go up to Mom and do this whole shtick again, and both of us are really tired of this.”

Adora nodded. “Only till Prom. Like I said, it’s three days. How bad could it possibly be?”

**Author's Note:**

> I might write more of this if I feel like it. Working with fictional languages is too much fun at times.


End file.
